Beverage dispensers are known devices to prepare a beverage from one or more beverage sources. In some types of beverage dispensers, beverage sources that include concentrates and/or powders are mixed with a liquid (e.g., water) to prepare the beverage. Some types of dispensers dispense relatively cold beverages (e.g., soft drinks), while other types of dispensers dispense relatively hot beverages (e.g., coffees, teas, and hot chocolates).
However, there is a high commercial potential for providing on premise to consumers seeking new coffee and beverages experiences, a more varied offering of fresh tasting or coffee-house quality, hot and cold beverages, such as whitened coffee or cocoa beverages, with different flavors such as mocha, vanilla, raspberry, banana, or others and/or different nutritional additives enhancing the nutritional value of these beverages.
In particular, there is an increasing trend of consumption of cold non-carbonated beverages, not based solely on carbohydrates components, that are more refreshing than hot coffee beverages and that can thus be consumed at any time of the day. There is also an increasing health awareness of consumers for non-carbonated beverages and energy or functional drinks as opposed to carbohydrate based carbonated beverages. In particular, operators are under increasing pressure from media, government and consumers to serve healthier alternatives to carbonated soft drinks.
Consumers also expect “coffee-house” quality, range and style in their coffees, and the demand remains very poor except in places where coffee can be brewed on spot. Offering brewed coffees also necessitates complicated logistics to supply to the foodservice location coffee beans, grinders and brewing devices. If the brewed coffees further need to be tailored to meet the consumers' demand in different flavors or nutritional values, the logistics become even more complex and time and labor consuming.
In addition, there is a contradiction in that stores such as quick-serve restaurants, convenience stores, coffee shops, donut stores, leisure places, etc., have limited counter space, while these stores look for multi-function systems to be able to meet the demand of a wider, more eclectic and often multi-cultural population of consumers.
On the operator's side, the operator wants simple and easy solutions due to limited, fast turnaround of staff. The solution also must overcome any concern on food safety and provide a consistent, reproducible beverage cup after cup.
Traditional hot beverage dispensers, such as those disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,419,120 are not adapted to fulfill these needs. These dispensers have multiple flavoring injectors and prepare a flavored beverage by dispensing a base powder, water, and one or more flavorings into a cup. However, when powder and water are mixed to provide a beverage, solids can remain that bind to the flavorings. When flavors are added, they can bind to remaining solids, producing flavor concentrations and unevenness when concentration of solids is high. When producing cold beverages, powder is especially hard to dissolve sufficiently to avoid the presence of a large solid concentration.
These dispensers require a large storage space for the powder with typically tall and large canisters. Other problems are that the characteristics of the powdered components are more susceptible to change due to the environmental conditions (humidity, temperature, . . . ) and are susceptible to transport damages with a change of the particle size due to compaction, which may consequently affect the solubility.
U.S. Publication No. 2004/0086620 relates to a method for delivering flavor compounds to a beverage. A flavor compound is mixed with a concentrate, or a concentrate and water mixture, just prior to the dispensing of the beverage. This method deals with the problem of degradation and instability of the aroma when premixed with a product concentrate. However, it is not adapted to deliver different flavors to a same concentrate in order to provide a wide choice of flavored or nutritionally enhanced beverages. In particular, mixing the flavor with the concentrate causes a problem of taste contamination, which deters other flavors from mixing with the same concentrate.
There is thus a need to develop a method to deliver on premise a variety of flavored or nutritionally enhanced hot and cold beverages like coffee, tea or cocoa specialties and juice beverages from a limited number of product base sources, in a more convenient and hygiene manner, with low labor, no flavor cross-contamination, no dissolution problems, within a compact foot print and without requiring specific chilling storage conditions. In addition, there are also needs for:                improving the consistency of the beverage,        providing a wider choice of components premix,        providing a faster dispense of the beverage,        improving the stability of the stored component(s), and        reducing the negative effect of the environmental storage conditions and eliminating the transportation damages of the product components.        